How to make a great R reproducible example

Question

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When discussing performance with colleagues, teaching, sending a bug report or searching for guidance on mailing lists and here on Stack Overflow, a reproducible example is often asked and always helpful.

What are your tips for creating an excellent example? How do you paste data structures from r in a text format? What other information should you include?

Are there other tricks in addition to using dput(), dump() or structure()? When should you include library() or require() statements? Which reserved words should one avoid, in addition to c, df, data, etc.?

How does one make a great r reproducible example?

Answer 1

Reproducible code is key to get help. However, there are many users that might be skeptical of pasting even a chunk of their data. For instance, they could be working with sensitive data or on an original data collected to use in a research paper. For any reason, I thought it would be nice to have a handy function for "deforming" my data before pasting it publicly. The anonymize function from the package SciencesPo is very silly, but for me it works nicely with dput function.

install.packages("SciencesPo")

dt <- data.frame(
    Z = sample(LETTERS,10),
    X = sample(1:10),
    Y = sample(c("yes", "no"), 10, replace = TRUE)
)

> dt
   Z  X   Y
1  D  8  no
2  T  1 yes
3  J  7  no
4  K  6  no
5  U  2  no
6  A 10 yes
7  Y  5  no
8  M  9 yes
9  X  4 yes
10 Z  3  no

Then I anonymize it:

> anonymize(dt)
     Z    X  Y
1   b2  2.5 c1
2   b6 -4.5 c2
3   b3  1.5 c1
4   b4  0.5 c1
5   b7 -3.5 c1
6   b1  4.5 c2
7   b9 -0.5 c1
8   b5  3.5 c2
9   b8 -1.5 c2
10 b10 -2.5 c1

One may also want to sample few variables instead of the whole data before apply anonymization and dput command.

    # sample two variables without replacement
> anonymize(sample.df(dt,5,vars=c("Y","X")))
   Y    X
1 a1 -0.4
2 a1  0.6
3 a2 -2.4
4 a1 -1.4
5 a2  3.6

Answer 2

Please do not paste your console outputs like this:

If I have a matrix x as follows:
> x <- matrix(1:8, nrow=4, ncol=2,
            dimnames=list(c("A","B","C","D"), c("x","y")))
> x
  x y
A 1 5
B 2 6
C 3 7
D 4 8
>

How can I turn it into a dataframe with 8 rows, and three
columns named `row`, `col`, and `value`, which have the
dimension names as the values of `row` and `col`, like this:
> x.df
    row col value
1    A   x      1
...
(To which the answer might be:
> x.df <- reshape(data.frame(row=rownames(x), x), direction="long",
+                varying=list(colnames(x)), times=colnames(x),
+                v.names="value", timevar="col", idvar="row")
)

We can not copy-paste it directly.

To make questions and answers properly reproducible, try to remove + & > before posting it and put # for outputs and comments like this:

#If I have a matrix x as follows:
x <- matrix(1:8, nrow=4, ncol=2,
            dimnames=list(c("A","B","C","D"), c("x","y")))
x
#  x y
#A 1 5
#B 2 6
#C 3 7
#D 4 8

# How can I turn it into a dataframe with 8 rows, and three
# columns named `row`, `col`, and `value`, which have the
# dimension names as the values of `row` and `col`, like this:

#x.df
#    row col value
#1    A   x      1
#...
#To which the answer might be:

x.df <- reshape(data.frame(row=rownames(x), x), direction="long",
                varying=list(colnames(x)), times=colnames(x),
                v.names="value", timevar="col", idvar="row")

One more thing, if you have used any function from certain package, mention that library.

Answer 3

Here is a good guide.

The most important point is: Just make sure that you make a small piece of code that we can run to see what the problem is. A useful function for this is dput(), but if you have very large data, you might want to make a small sample dataset or only use the first 10 lines or so.

EDIT:

Also make sure that you identified where the problem is yourself. The example should not be an entire R script with "On line 200 there is an error". If you use the debugging tools in R (I love browser()) and Google you should be able to really identify where the problem is and reproduce a trivial example in which the same thing goes wrong.

Answer 4

Often you need some data for an example, however, you don't want to post your exact data. To use some existing data.frame in established library, use data command to import it.

e.g.,

data(mtcars)

and then do the problem

names(mtcars)
your problem demostrated on the mtcars data set

Answer 5

Inspired by this very post, I now use a handy function
reproduce(<mydata>) when I need to post to StackOverflow.

---

QUICK INSTRUCTIONS

If myData is the name of your object to reproduce, run the following in R:

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
source_url("https://raw.github.com/rsaporta/pubR/gitbranch/reproduce.R")

reproduce(myData)

---

Details:

This function is an intelligent wrapper to dput and does the following:

• automatically samples a large data set (based on size and class. Sample size can be adjusted)
• creates a dput output
• allows you to specify which columns to export
• appends to the front of it objName <- ... so that it can be easily copy+pasted, but...
• If working on a mac, the output is automagically copied to the clipboard, so that you can simply run it and then paste to your question.

The source is available here:

• Github - pubR/reproduce.R

---

Example:

# sample data
DF <- data.frame(id=rep(LETTERS, each=4)[1:100], replicate(100, sample(1001, 100)), Class=sample(c("Yes", "No"), 100, TRUE))

DF is about 100 x 102. I want to sample 10 rows, and a few specific columns

reproduce(DF, cols=c("id", "X1", "X73", "Class"))  # I could also specify the column number. 

Gives the following output:

This is what the sample looks like: 

    id  X1 X73 Class
1    A 266 960   Yes
2    A 373 315    No            Notice the selection split 
3    A 573 208    No           (which can be turned off)
4    A 907 850   Yes
5    B 202  46   Yes         
6    B 895 969   Yes   <~~~ 70 % of selection is from the top rows
7    B 940 928    No
98   Y 371 171   Yes          
99   Y 733 364   Yes   <~~~ 30 % of selection is from the bottom rows.  
100  Y 546 641    No        


    ==X==============================================================X==
         Copy+Paste this part. (If on a Mac, it is already copied!)
    ==X==============================================================X==

 DF <- structure(list(id = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 25L, 25L, 25L), .Label = c("A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", "W", "X", "Y"), class = "factor"), X1 = c(266L, 373L, 573L, 907L, 202L, 895L, 940L, 371L, 733L, 546L), X73 = c(960L, 315L, 208L, 850L, 46L, 969L, 928L, 171L, 364L, 641L), Class = structure(c(2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L), .Label = c("No", "Yes"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("id", "X1", "X73", "Class"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 6L, 7L, 98L, 99L, 100L)) 

    ==X==============================================================X==

Notice also that the entirety of the output is in a nice single, long line, not a tall paragraph of chopped up lines. This makes it easier to read on SO questions posts and also easier to copy+paste.

---

Update Oct 2013:

You can now specify how many lines of text output will take up (ie, what you will paste into StackOverflow). Use the lines.out=n argument for this. Example:

reproduce(DF, cols=c(1:3, 17, 23), lines.out=7) yields:

    ==X==============================================================X==
         Copy+Paste this part. (If on a Mac, it is already copied!)
    ==X==============================================================X==

 DF <- structure(list(id = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 25L,25L, 25L), .Label
      = c("A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H","I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U","V", "W", "X", "Y"), class = "factor"),
      X1 = c(809L, 81L, 862L,747L, 224L, 721L, 310L, 53L, 853L, 642L),
      X2 = c(926L, 409L,825L, 702L, 803L, 63L, 319L, 941L, 598L, 830L),
      X16 = c(447L,164L, 8L, 775L, 471L, 196L, 30L, 420L, 47L, 327L),
      X22 = c(335L,164L, 503L, 407L, 662L, 139L, 111L, 721L, 340L, 178L)), .Names = c("id","X1",
      "X2", "X16", "X22"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(1L,2L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 6L, 7L, 98L, 99L, 100L))

    ==X==============================================================X==

Answer 6

The R-help mailing list has a posting guide which covers both asking and answering questions, including an example of generating data:

Examples: Sometimes it helps to provide a small example that someone can actually run. For example:

If I have a matrix x as follows:

  > x <- matrix(1:8, nrow=4, ncol=2,
                dimnames=list(c("A","B","C","D"), c("x","y"))
  > x
    x y
  A 1 5
  B 2 6
  C 3 7
  D 4 8
  >

how can I turn it into a dataframe with 8 rows, and three columns named 'row', 'col', and 'value', which have the dimension names as the values of 'row' and 'col', like this:

  > x.df
     row col value
  1    A   x      1

...
(To which the answer might be:

  > x.df <- reshape(data.frame(row=rownames(x), x), direction="long",
                    varying=list(colnames(x)), times=colnames(x),
                    v.names="value", timevar="col", idvar="row")

)

The word small is especially important. You should be aiming for a minimal reproducible example, which means that the data and the code should be as simple as possible to explain the problem.

EDIT: Pretty code is easier to read than ugly code. Use a style guide.